With my whole family – including the 5 and 7 year old boys – I am continuing the sessions of Clank! A Deck-Building Adventure – a great present from my friends for my birthday and wonderful fun for us all. Especially during the forced isolation! We already familiarized ourselves pretty thoroughly with the base game – both in multiplayer as well as solo options. I wrote about my first impression here. The time has come now to test some of the expansions which I received with the main title. We will start with Expeditions: Gold and Silk!
The Expansion
If after playing the base game of Clank! you still have an insatiable thirst for plunder (I like that publisher statement!) the Clank! Expeditions: Gold and Silk will be a perfect answer to this. We are receiving here two new boards with some elements plus new rules. Let me provide more details.
PS. This expansion requires Clank! A Deck-Building Adventure to play.
Expeditions: Gold
This first expedition begins in a mine abandoned by the Ruin Dwarven Mining Company (Ruin DMC) when it became infested with monsters. But it still holds plenty of gold for those daring enough to enter.
On the map we see a lot of gold deposits – you can excavate each of them (only once) and get the treasure. Who gets most – receives additional VPs for the best miner! What is more, should you be willing to save on time, there are fast elevators enabling quick move into dungeon and out 🙂 At price, of course!
Expeditions: Silk
Still more wealth awaits in the Spider Queen’s Lair. Surely the Spider Queen herself is just a legend meant to scare people away from such a fancy castle…
We are getting here new artifact (worth 8 VPs); new web counters – which makes passing some of the corridors more time consuming but also beneficial for players (VPs); some of the rooms will be full of spiderweb so getting anything from them will require a sharp sword. Last but not least, paying 8 skill points you would be able to acquire very valuable treasures from the Spider Queen web!
The sessions
Expeditions: Silk
We started from the Silk expansion, playing against Spider Queen herself! Our 5 and 7 years old boys simply loved the theme and suspense of crawling through the dungeons full of spider web. Both teams invested in backpacks as carrying more than one artifact seems to be one of the best ideas to get the points.
The spiders were troublesome and indeed were delaying our actions – both spiderweb in chambers as well as in corridors. At the end as usually it was run for our lives – this time everybody survived.
The end results were very close:
- Michal + Kuba – 120
- Magda + Natan – 114
Expeditions: Gold
The time has come to visit the Ruin Dwarven Mining Company (Ruin DMC) and its vast corridors and chambers full of gold. Ability to dig out the gold really gives new possibilities to gather the points. The board is pretty large when we take into consideration how far you have to go to reach the most precious artifacts.
The team of me and Natan were first to get out and also won the prize for the best miner. Still we scored few points less then the opponent team:
- Magda + Kuba – 110
- Michal + Natan – 106
First impressions
Let me share now my impression regarding that expansion:
- a nice variety to the main game – not overly complex, but gives possibility for many more hours of fun
- both expansions in the box were very thematic – our children simply loved the Spider Queen!
- larger, longer and more difficult boards to play; I had a feeling in base game that when you just started to have a really powerful set of cards, game was ending. Here it lasts much longer.
- beautiful components – I really like the way Clank! is designed and produced!
All in all, this is a neat addition to base game, not a ground-breaking change but a subtle expansion give more fun and replay-value the game. This will not be the case with the next expansion, which I will describe soon!
The Boardgames Chronicle 